


for your eyes only

by effie214



Category: Doctor Who RPF
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-27
Updated: 2012-12-27
Packaged: 2017-11-22 16:05:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,991
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/611672
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/effie214/pseuds/effie214
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A tale of evolution in five parts. Written for the mattkazstrophe ficathon; prompt: sunglasses.</p>
            </blockquote>





	for your eyes only

i.

He first notices them when he catches up to her just after their audition. She slides the glasses on top of her head almost as an afterthought as she digs around the impossibly large purse that dangles as a juxtaposition around her dainty wrist. They’re black and round and seem like they should somehow overpower her, but then he realizes that even with their size and placement as an emergency headband, they’re doing nothing to curb her wayfarer hair as it fights for energetic release in the afternoon wind.

He lengthens his stride solely on instinct, so when he catches up to her, he’s out of both breath and words. Her eyes widen ever so slightly in surprise, but she returns his wide grin automatically and they both settle comfortably against the brick walkway and in each other’s company.

They sit outside at a nearby café by mutual but unspoken agreement, stirring tea against the playfulness of the wind, and though the intent is muffled beneath the other two sounds, he can still see it in the sunlight that reflects off her lenses. He knows he shouldn’t feel the inevitability as heavily as he does, that he shouldn’t consider allowing this charge he feels through every inch of him to become impetus. But there is a magnetism here, one he’d felt like a restart to his system the minute she’d walked across the threshold, and he knows from both professional and personal experience that ignorance, even the most calculated and forcibly perpetuated kind, is not bliss. Instead, making himself blind feels like it would be unnecessary torture, and as he listens and looks at her talk about everything and nothing at all – and how it feels like it just doesn’t matter what she says as long as she never stops talking to him – it won’t be the last time he pauses to consider just how much the benefits to his personal life might have to outweigh those to his professional.

(It also won’t be the last time he sees her sip coffee in the morning sunlight, and it’s not the caffeine but exhilaration that keeps him running.)

ii.

She clatters her sunglasses on the side table in his lounge as she toes her trainers off. It’s part of the routine now when she comes over to his (or vice versa.) He’s still in the kitchen plating the takeaway she stopped to get, and even through the momentary, subdued silence within the flat doesn’t give him away, she knows he’s munching on her chips without permission.

She plops unceremoniously down on his sofa with a sigh and thumbs through her bag for a pen with which to make notes on the new script. Her fingers find her phone first, however, and her heart sinks like lead in her chest. Even when she wants to escape it most, real life seems to creep up on her like soundless shadows, and as much as she wills them away, they continue to haunt her.

She and Patrick have been going back and forth about this for days now, about how she’s always elsewhere physically and emotionally, and she’s drained. She wants to wave the white flag, give in and give up, but everything seems to circle frustratingly back to the fact that even though her professional life has never been better, her personal one is splintering along the seams and there’s no amount of expertise that could tie it back together.

She turns the mobile over and over in her hand, and when Matt wraps his fingers gently around her shoulder, it falls from her hand to the table next to her and sends her glasses skittering across the worn hardwood planks. Matt puts the food down in front of the couch and kneels ostensibly to pick her items up again, but when she tucks her chin to her chest in a valiant but ultimately futile effort to stop another round of burning, frustrated tears from coming, he leaves them teetering in between grooves and pulls her to him. He rubs her back and she buries her face in the crook of her shoulder.

He never asks what’s wrong, and for the first time it hurts just a little bit less because he’s here.

It’ll mean more later. They’ll both want it to. But in the moment, she just holds on for dear life and trusts him not to let go.

(The now and forever part comes later.)

iii.

It’s nearly six months later when they’re wandering through New York, and it’s somewhere in Greenwich Village that she slides her hand around his. He can’t stop his breath from hitching, but their fingers lock much more fluidly and easily, and in a foreign land, he feels like he’s home.

She tries to keep her gaze straightforward and nonchalant, but he knows her far too well to ignore the way she’s swallowing too much and playing with the edge of her coat nervously. His surprised, delighted smile grows infinitely in amusement; did she really think he wouldn’t reciprocate? Did she really think he hasn’t been trying to figure out how to do the same thing for months now?

And then he realizes that she just might think so. For all the speaking they do, sometimes the words just don’t come properly.

But when he stops in the middle of Spring Street, the only thing that comes out of his mouth is a kiss, placed gently but firmly on her lips. He cups her cheeks and etches the promises into her skin with the pads of his thumbs: I’ve waited forever, too; let’s just jump and see where we land.

He groans softly when he feels her tongue tangle with his, just as the entirety of her being has, and the same shiver that he felt on another street in another city screams up and down his spine. But even in how right it all feels, he needs to be sure, and pulls himself from her ever so slightly, smiling softly at her whimper of protestation. He slides her glasses off her face and palms them in his hand, which refuses to be denied access to her body and comes to rest on her hip. He looks for answers in her eyes and when he sees them not only reciprocated but amplified, he turns on his heel and steps close to the median in his haste to get a taxi.

(He steps on and breaks her shades in the middle of the night after they take a very brief break so he can get them both some water, and his promise to replace them is the first of many he’ll make.)

iv.

It’s a different set of sunglasses sitting on her face in San Diego, a pair of Aviators so like his it always felt like synchronicity, but now they feel heavy and burdened in just how uncomfortable they are. Her hand still tingles from where he’d grabbed it during their interview with Barrowman, and she looks out to the grey sea as evening settles in, wondering why she feels the complete opposite.

They’ve been together since New York, careful and calculating in their on-set hours as they are as unburdened and carefree in their off, but now that line hasn’t just blended, it’s disappeared entirely, and she’s unsure as to what to do about it.

It’s been speculated about, from their first day on another beach so very long ago and so very, very far away, but until today it’s always been private; for their eyes only. It’s not that she’s ashamed; far from it. It’s just that they’ve worked so very hard for it to be sacred, to be theirs and unsullied by the rest of reality, and that he’d changed everything so quickly and unthinkingly, leaves her unsettled.

She feels him before she hears him; the air always leans toward him when he’s near, and she’s drawn like a compass to his north star. He sits on the sand next to her, bending his gangly legs and resting his elbows on top of them, staring toward the horizon.

The tension radiates off him as hotly and palpably as the California sun had before it disappeared behind the clouds, and she finally removes the glasses from her face, weighing her words as she folds the temples of her frames toward each other. When he covers her hand again, though, it doesn’t feel shocking or wrong. It feels like everything else always has; blindingly right.

“I wasn’t thinking,” he says quietly. “I forget sometimes that I’m supposed to keep you all to myself.”

She lifts one corner of her mouth. “Are you saying you don’t want me all to yourself? Because there are a few thousand fanboys back there that wouldn’t mind taking me off your hands.”

He blows out a chuckle. “Don’t shortchange yourself, Kazza. There are at least that many fangirls, too.”

They pause again, but it’s not fraught with as much friction this time. “It just caught me off guard,” she finally says. “This isn’t Cardiff, or even London. We’re not safe here.”

He turns his head to look her head-on. “We’re safe as long as we’re together. Sod the rest of it.”

It doesn’t feel like it should be that simple. But oh how she wants it to be.

They’ve leapt without looking before; flown solely on faith. And she knows as certainly as she knows her own name that she’d follow him to the ends of the Earth, but this is one of those times where actions speak far more loudly than intentions. 

She leans across the sand and kisses him deeply, meaningfully, and the gulls overhead squawk in adoration.

(It turns out the only people that comment on their togetherness whilst they’re in San Diego are an elderly couple called Margie and Paul who sit across from them in the diner they eat at at three in the morning when neither can sleep. Margie tells them she and Paul met and were friends over fifty years before in New York, and though it took them decades to find each other again, they’re in love and planning to spend the rest of their lives together. The symbiosis warms Karen more than the hot plate in front of her, and this time she reaches out to him.)

v.

His glasses are tucked in the crew neck of the t-shirt he’s wearing when she all but launches herself at him outside Customs at LAX, but he doesn’t mind the indentation that’s going to be left there thanks to the force of her embrace. She tastes like sunshine and tomorrow as he tangles his hand in her hair and she wraps her legs around his waist. 

When she slides down his body, he brushes the fringe out of her eyes and quips, “Thanks for the warm welcome, miss, but I’m supposed to be meeting my girlfriend.”

They head toward Baggage Claim and she slides her arm down his and threads their fingers together. “That’s a pity. She the jealous type?”

“Terribly. You’d think she’d be better with it, given how many birds I’m beating off with a stick on a daily basis.”

She stops in the middle of the terminal, much to the chagrin of several other passengers, and deadpans, “Are you going to read for some comedies while you’re out here? Because you’re just hilarious.”

He curls his arm around her petite frame and presses a kiss beneath her ear in an attempt to —

She cuts him off before he can even finish thinking the sentence, and good God, does he love her. 

“Don’t try to distract me, Smith.”

“Wouldn’t dream of it, Gillan,” he replies.

(The sunglasses rest that night on his carry-on bag, not tossed aside but instead protecting an even more important accessory, one that won’t be worn on her face but instead hopefully on her left hand.)

fin


End file.
